Preparing the garden of the soul

Preparing the garden of the soul

Life is just the process of you becoming who you want to die as. That’s basically it.

We can complicate it, confuse it, and make it really difficult, violent and adversarial if we like. We can make it about drama, and ego, and he said, she said bullshit. We can make it about how other people are destroying the planet or that racists are ruining the world, or that meat-eaters are cruel and unkind, or any number of other tangents.

But the simple fact is, this life is about preparing the garden of your soul.

You have a certain number of years afforded you, in this lifetime, on this earth, for you to watch, witness, learn and then decide for yourself who would you like to leave this place as.

Just as the child in the womb is only really just preparing its limbs, its senses and faculties, that it may explore and navigate this world, so too are we preparing the vehicle with which we will navigate and explore the next.

There difference between the child in the womb and your existence here, however, is that you have a conscious part to play, unlike the child that is subject to the thoughtfulness of the mother carrying it.

In this life, you get to decide how you wish to respond to stimuli, how you wish to direct your energy, how much time you spend weeding your garden and how much time you spend looking over your fence at telling your neighbour to use less water in washing their driveaway.

You can sit at the window judging others on how they park their cars or whether they pick up their dog’s shit, or you can go out into the garden and plant seeds that will give flowers and prune your trees that they may give fruit in spring.

This life is the slow and gradual process of you deciding who you want to leave this place as. That’s it. Everything in this world is an opportunity for you to refine your idea of self or it is a distraction from the refinement of self.

Nothing else matters much. We don’t keep anything else from this place but for who we have become. We do not keep the books that we wrote or the medals that we were awarded, we do not keep with us our homes or bank balances, or even how much of an impact we had on the world, other than the times you brought joy to the heart of another.

The only thing we get to keep from this existence is who we became in the process of existing. The content of your character, the cleanliness of your heart, the clarity and purity of your thoughts, and the calm and composure with which you were able to love all.